by David Laskin
Under the Netziv: Lamm, Torah Lishmah, p. 28.
Without the work of the scribe . . . the linguistic historian: Johnson, A History of the Jews, pp. 82, 90.
“Hashem, His will, and His word . . .”: Quoted in Eliach, Reb Chaim of Volozhin, p. 170.
CHAPTER TWO: THE MOVE TO RAKOV
“I have no desire for any understanding . . .”: Quoted in Eliach, Reb Chaim of Volozhin, p. 75.
marched to the house of the Netziv . . .: Details on celebrations in Volozhin from Eliach, Reb Chaim of Volozhin, p. 103.
“Jewish kingdom of strength”: Volozhin Yizkor book, p. 114.
one third will die: Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 12.
the family went by the name Kagan: According to records in the Minsk National Historical archive in Belarus, Sarah’s father’s name was Zelick-Movsha Kagan. However, on Sarah’s Certificate of Death provided by the Bureau of Records, Department of Health, New York City, her father’s name is given as Selig Moses Shapiro.
choice of four synagogues: I have based my supposition that Rakov had four synagogues on evidence provided in Rakov Community Memorial Book by former residents of Rakow in Israel and the United States, edited by Haim Abramson, translated by Ruth Wilnai (Tel Aviv, Israel: 1959)—hereafter the Rakov Yizkor book. I am guessing that the Old Shul was the Great Shul, though I have not been able to confirm this.
A barrel of herring and a barrel of kerosene: Details on a typical shtetl shop from Lynn, These We Remember, p. 6.
The students had organized: Eliach, There Once Was a World, p. 183.
in the holy city of Tzvat: The Volozhin Yizkor book says the community was in Jerusalem.
Even the Netziv: Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter “Haskalah, Secular Studies and the Closing of the Yeshiva in Volozhin in 1892” in Torah U-Madda Journal, January 1, 1990, p. 104.
“Don’t manage me”: New York Post, September 6, 1964, clipping on file with the Maidenform Collection, 1922–1997, the Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Hereafter, Maidenform Collection.
Gishe Sore was a famously bad cook: The story of Gishe Sore’s lousy cooking comes from my mother, Leona Cohen Laskin, who lived in the flat below Gishe Sore as a child. The story of Itel taking charge of the younger children and forcing them to eat their mother’s bread comes from an unpublished biographical essay on Itel called “Ida Rosenthal: A Remembrance,” undated and unattributed, but apparently written in 1977 by Hy Lieberman. Hereafter, Itel’s Story.
Kaganovich and Rubilnik: My cousins in Israel speculate that Rubilnik may have been Beyle’s mother’s maiden name.
CHAPTER THREE: THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY
Itel took it for granted: From Itel’s Story.
the number of Jewish students capped: In Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Benjamin Nathans says that when quotas were first instituted, “Jewish female students were not regarded as warranting such drastic action,” though quotas for them started in the 1890s; pp. 266–267.
published in underground Jewish newspapers: See The Jewish Bund in Russia from Its Origins to 1905, by Henry J. Tobias (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), p. 251, for a discussion of the Jewish press at the turn of the last century.
Nails were driven into the heads: Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871–1917 (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 305.
“The riot was now at its height”: www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Kishinev.html. Korolenko describes the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, from “Kishineff: The Medieval Outbreak Against the Jews” in The Great Events by Famous Historians, vol. 20 (n.p.: National Alumni, 1914), pp. 35–49.
the citizens of Kishinev killed forty-nine Jews: Statistics, facts, and background on the pogrom come from http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kishinev/kishinev-pogrom.html.
It was “the last pogrom . . .”: www.forward.com/articles/8544/. “Kishinev 1903: The Birth of a Century,” by J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Daily Forward, April 4, 2003. This article also provides text for some of Bialik’s poem, “In the City of Slaughter.”
She was twelve years old: I have made an educated guess of Itel’s age here. The Bund was founded in 1897; so assuming the push for membership happened in 1898, Itel would have been twelve.
One Friday evening: The account of the young Bundist with the mole is from the Rakov Yizkor book.
“organize armed resistance”: Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, p. 226.
Bundists were being arrested: Ibid., p. 229.
“the halo of heroism”: “Memories of the Zionist movement and the Bund,” in the Rakov Yizkor book.
Students took to the streets: Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: A Short History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 19–20.
the Rakov Bundists held secret meetings: Rakov Yizkor book and Itel’s Story (which has details about weapons and target practice in the forest).
Jews taken up arms: Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, p. 343.
Wolf was drafted: From Itel’s Story.
to agitate from within: Levin, While Messiah Tarried, p. 306.
happened to be Itel’s nineteenth birthday: Correlating Itel’s birth with Bloody Sunday raises a rather sticky chronological question. Before the Communist Revolution of 1917, Russia did not use the Gregorian (also known as new style—NS) calendar that had long been standard in the West and in the United States but rather the slightly different Julian, or old style (OS), calendar. Itel always gave her birthday as January 9, 1886—but it’s unclear whether this was OS or NS. Bloody Sunday fell on January 9, 1905, OS—but the NS date was January 22. So if Itel was born on January 9, NS, then her birthday was not on Bloody Sunday after all. Specialists in Russian-Jewish genealogy consulted on this matter have pointed out that birth dates were notoriously imprecise for our immigrant ancestors. Many Russian Jews used the Hebrew calendar to mark their children’s birthdays—and then rough correlations were made to the Julian and/or Gregorian calendar. Some simply invented or changed their birthdays. There was no official agency in the United States that translated OS birth dates to NS birth dates. Given Itel’s character and politics, it’s possible that she recorded her birthday as January 9 precisely because it coincided with Bloody Sunday—but the exact date is impossible to ascertain.
the official government count: David Floyd, Russia in Revolt (London: Macdonald & Co, 1969), p. 64.
“Attack the stores . . .”: Quoted in Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, p. 295.
“It could achieve everything”: Quoted in Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, p. 309.
In the first years of their marriage: I have guessed at the year of Shula’s birth. In the memoir that Sonia’s son Benny wrote, Sonia states: “Shula, the oldest, died of an illness when she was 4 or 5 years old.” She had to have been born before 1902, since Doba was born in 1903.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE BOYS
“The root of all evil . . .”: Quoted in Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, p. 312.
“A young muzhik was smashing . . .”: Isaac Babel, “The Story of My Dovecote” in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 610. Khariton Efrussi is surely a reference to the Ephrussi family that Edmund de Waal belongs to and wrote about in his recent family history, The Hare with Amber Eyes. Though there is no Khariton on de Waal’s family tree, the Ephrussi family did make their fortune in Odessa and had a prominent house there.
“torrent of Jewish blood”: Quoted in Levin, While Messiah Tarried, p. 328.
“brazen, insolent way”: Quoted in Floyd, Russia in Revolt, p. 93.
“Repairing watches or clocks is fascinating . . .”: Hyman Cohen, As I Recall (self-published, 1967), p. 5.
CHAPTER FIVE: LOWER EAS
T SIDE
East River, smelling of fish: All-of-a-Kind Family, by Sydney Taylor, quoted in Tenement, by Raymond Bial (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), n.p.
Half a million Jews: Johnson, A History of the Jews, p. 372.
350 square feet between them: Lawrence J. Epstein, At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side, 1880–1920 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), p. 46.
Even on Kol Nidre night: Albert Waldinger, ed., Shining and Shadow: An Anthology of Early Yiddish Stories from the Lower East Side (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), pp. 67–68.
On a special occasion: Epstein, At the Edge of a Dream, p. 177.
barely 12 percent of Jews: Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 13.
“Success, American style . . .”: Harry Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then: The Lower East Side, 1900–1914, An Intimate Chronicle (New York, Dial Press, 1971), p. 33.
Zionism remained strong: Rakov Yizkor book, pp. 14–15.
it should have been Samuel: There is some confusion over my grandfather’s name in Yiddish. In a letter to Sonia, Shalom Tvi refers to him as Shalom—and in fact the names Shalom and Solomon are closely related. My mother had always told me that her father’s name was Shmuel in the Old Country—which became Samuel or Sam in America—but it’s possible that his Yiddish name was Shalom or Solomon, not Shmuel, and he chose to Americanize it as Sam.
CHAPTER SIX: THE BIRTH OF A BUSINESS
Many of the details on the founding or A. Cohen & Sons and its early years come from Hyman Cohen’s As I Recall.
“Machines, needles, thread, pressing cloths . . .”: Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, p. 69. Other details on sweatshop and pay, from Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, chap. 3.
I have over a thousand dollars: The exact sum and how much various relatives chipped in is much debated in the family.
“the sentimental heart and the battling mind . . .”: Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, p. 120.
“the capital of capitalism . . .”: Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, p. 10.
CHAPTER SEVEN: SOCIALIST IN A BLACK SATIN DRESS
I relied on Itel’s Story for many details in this chapter.
“The Jewish needle . . .”: Quoted in Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, p. 63.
“I am a socialist because . . .”: Quoted in How We Lived: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America, by Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo (New York: Richard Marek, 1979), p. 190.
“A man either had God or socialism: . . .”: Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, p. 111.
CHAPTER EIGHT: FIRST WORLD WAR
When the news reached Volozhin: Volozhin Yizkor book, p. 343.
When Russia mobilized: S. Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), p. ix.
“swaying back and forth . . .”: Quoted in The Long Way Home, by David Laskin (New York: Harper, 2010), p. 92.
Some 600,000 Jews were sent packing: Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure, p. ix.
Cossacks were desecrating: Ibid., p. 281.
Again and again, a story was repeated: Ibid., cited in Laskin, The Long Way Home, p. 92.
In a neighboring shtetl: Krasnoe Yizkor book.
A letter appealing for emergency aid: On Foreign Soil: An Autobiographical Novel, by Falk Zolf at www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov//rkv_pages/rakov_stories_onfor.html.
In March of 1916: Details from The Eastern Front, 1914–1917, by Norman Stone (New York: Scribner, 1975), pp. 228–229, 231.
Shalom Tvi managed to secure: No papers or photos exist to document Shimon Dov’s move to Rakov, but there is one compelling piece of physical evidence. It is the Jewish custom to bury the dead within twenty-four hours of their passing, and even in fine weather it would have been difficult to transport a body from Volozhin to Rakov that quickly in the days of horse-drawn carts. In February 1917, with the roads drifted over in snow, Volozhin sealed off on the front line, and the Pale crippled by war, such a move would have been next to impossible. Since Shimon Dov was buried in Rakov, he must have been living there at the time of his death. Aside from this evidence, family customs and habits also support the idea that Shimon Dov moved to Rakov during the war. His son Avram Akiva lived with his children in New York, so it seems logical that Shimon Dov, a widower in time of war, would have moved in with his last son remaining in Europe.
It was International Women’s Day: Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 308.
Police and Cossacks were called in: Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 44.
no one had thought to issue whips: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 308.
February 23 in the old-style Julian: Dates in the old-style Julian calendar are thirteen days earlier than dates in the new-style Gregorian calendar (see footnote above); hence in Russia, which was still using the Julian calendar, it was known as the February Revolution—even though in the West the date fell in March.
The Petrograd chief of police: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 310.
As of March 15, 1917: Geoffrey Jukes, The First World War: The Eastern Front, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002), p. 60.
“There is nothing more to discuss . . .”: Quoted in Laskin, The Long Way Home, p. 119.
Russia must withdraw immediately: Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 51.
In the first week of July: Ibid., p. 57.
“the worst possible material . . .”: Quoted in Laskin, The Long Way Home, p. 135.
“it will be a shameful peace”: Quoted in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 544.
Russia lost not only all of its western territories: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 548.
The regime change came as a huge relief: Some of the details here were supplied by my maternal grandmother, Gisri Sore Galpierjn. Gisri Sore was the daughter of a prominent family in the shtetl of Krasniki—fifty-five miles north-northeast of Minsk. During the Great War a gentlemanly German officer was billeted in their house. The officer told the family that he would help them in any way he could after the war and he made good on his promise. When Gisri Sore decided to immigrate to America in 1921 at the age of eighteen, she contacted the German officer and he helped her arrange passage. In America she Americanized her name to Gladys Helperin. Gladys married Sam Cohen shortly after the death of his first wife Celia, raised his four children, and bore him a daughter, my mother, Leona Pauline Cohen, in 1926.
When Passover came: The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume III: 1914 to 2008, by Antony Polonsky (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), p. 19.
“On the earth this is the last part . . .”: Arnold Zweig, quoted in War Land on the Eastern Front, by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 191.
There were stories: Liulevicius, War Land, p. 120.
“Jews are living here in considerable numbers . . .”: Ibid., p. 120.
“The shelling did not come in bursts . . .”: Captain Ben H. Chastaine, History of the 18th U.S. Infantry, First Division 1812–1919 (New York: Hymans Publishing), p. 47.
For a week they lived on: Jeremiah M. Evarts, Cantigny: A Corner of the War (Privately printed, 1938), p. 2.
The shriek was directly overhead: Details on shell explosion from Evarts, Cantigny, p. 73.
A soldier with Company K: Testimony of Corporal Fidelis H. Elder, on file in National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, Maryland.
But Hyman gave a different account: Hyman’s account in As I Recall, pp. 32–41, has a number of errors: he puts the date of Quesenberry’s wounding and death a month later than it actually occurre
d; the part about Quesenberry’s refusing aid in the church basement seems unlikely since Corporal Fidelis H. Elder, in sworn testimony, describes him being removed in an ambulance in which he died on the way to the hospital. Hyman states at the start of the book that he was writing “from memory” and the events of the Great War had occurred a half century earlier.
The hard part would be fending off: History of the First Division During the World War, 1917–1919, compiled by the Society of the First Division (Philadelphia: Winston, 1922), p. 83.
“No more glorious task . . .”: Chastaine, History of the 18th, p. 59.
“Blinding flashes of lightning . . .”: Ibid., p. 61.
the serene neoclassical façade: Evarts, Cantigny, p. 86.
“No man is fearless in battle . . .”: Charles H. Abels, The Last of the Fighting Four (New York: Vantage Press, 1968), p. 77.
Casualties mounted: Chastaine, History of the 18th, p. 63.
“like insects fleeing to the rear”: quoted in Laskin, The Long Way Home, p. 220.
Captain Robert S. Gill: Hyman mistakenly identified him as Captain Gilbert in As I Recall.
horrific flanking fire: Chastaine, History of the 18th, p. 64.
“so exhausted . . . that it was often necessary”: Douglas V. Johnson II and Rolfe L. Hillman, Jr., Soissons 1918 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), p. 126.
only seventy-nine returned: Chastaine, History of the 18th, p. 66.
The First Division Infantry as a whole: American Armies and Battlefields in Europe (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1992), p. 87.
For the first time since September 1914: Johnson and Hillman, Soissons, p. 125.
The blisters raised by the mustard gas: In As I Recall, p. 39, Hyman mentions the permanent scar on the lower part of his chin; his daughter Barbara Weisenfeld remembers scars on his neck behind his left ear.
CHAPTER NINE: PIONEERS
For background on Maidenform’s founding and early years, I relied on Itel’s Story, the Maidenform Collection: They Made America, by Harold Evans (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), pp. 308–315; Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women, edited by Joan N. Burstyn, Women’s Project of New Jersey (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990); Uplift: The Bra in America, by Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); “At the Curve Exchange,” by Vicki Howard in Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender and Culture in Modern America, edited by Philip Scranton (New York: Routledge, 2001); and “Her Half-Billion Dollar Shape,” by Pete Martin, Saturday Evening Post, October 15, 1949.